Mexican soldiers find slain relatives of human rights activist

Bodies had been buried, dug up.
By Dudley Althaus, By Dudley Althaus

MEXICO CITY — Soldiers recovered the bodies early Friday of three close relatives of a prominent human rights activist who herself was assassinated last year in a small town near Ciudad Juárez on the Texas border.

The sister, brother and sister-in-law of activist Josefina Reyes Salazar had been abducted Feb. 7 by at least six armed men as they traveled a road near their home in Guadalupe, on the Rio Grande 35 miles downriver from El Paso.

Their bodies were dumped on a busy highway near the town sometime before dawn, prosecutor Jorge Gonzalez said at a news conference.

Malena and Elias Reyes and Elias' wife, Luisa Ornelas, had been shot some days ago, Gonzalez said. They appear to have been buried, then dug up and placed on the highway for authorities to find.

Placards left with the bodies accused the three of being “hawks,” or spotters for criminal gangs.

“The investigation will go where it has to go,” Gonzalez vowed. “This is a priority investigation.”

The three are the latest of some dozen human rights activists or their relatives murdered in Juárez and the state of Chihuahua in the past three years. They include six members of the Reyes Salazar family killed in the past two years.

“This crime cannot remain in the sea of impunity that is drowning this city,” Gustavo de la Rosa, Chihuahua state's human rights investigator in Ciudad Juárez, said at the news conference. “It's an unquestionable aggression against human rights defenders.”

Josefina Reyes, 54, had blamed Mexican soldiers for the abduction and murder of her son, Julio Cesar, in 2009.

She staged protests in front of the federal attorney general's office in Juárez to demand her son's death be investigated and founded a human rights group in the towns downriver from the city.

Reyes was shot to death in early January last year. Her brother Ruben, a baker in Guadalupe, was killed last August.

Arsonists burned two of the Reyes Salazar family's homes in Guadalupe on Feb. 15.

The home of another activist who has joined them in their protests was burned in Juárez last week.


(2011-2-26/mysanantonio.com)